RANDOM WALK

Your future always will be bright if you open a fortune cookie baked by Herman Wong.

"You don't want to spoil someone's evening," says Mr. Wong, founder and president of Fortella Fortune Cookie Inc., a small Chicago bakery with an Italian-sounding name that's short for "fortune teller."

And that's exactly what you want your fortune cookie to do -- tell your fortune -- not offer an unsatisfying pearl of wisdom.

Says Chicago real estate developer Raymond Chin, a co-owner of Chinatown's Phoenix restaurant, "I like the ones that predict the future, like, 'Your development will be successful.' "

Fortune cookies, which in the 1930s were employed as a gimmick in the makeover of San Francisco's Chinatown, are finding a new popularity. You can make your own with a $28 mail-order kit from style maven Martha Stewart. And businesses are increasingly using the folded wafers to communicate corporate messages.

But the source of the fortunes found in run-of-the-mill cookies is a secret better guarded than the dough recipe.

A member of the family that owns Chicago-based Golden Dragon Fortune Cookie Co. declined comment on the company's messages, saying, "It doesn't matter as long as the cookie tastes good."

Fortella's Mr. Wong says that when he started his bakery in 1985, he gathered favorite messages from family and friends. But some fortunes come from more mundane sources.

"Most people buy them from the manufacturers," says Cameron Pon, treasurer of Chicago bakery Noodles of China Inc., which specializes in cookies with marketing messages.

Massachusetts-based fortune cookie oven manufacturer United Automation Technology Inc. has a master list of more than 5,000 fortunes that it sells to bakeries that buy ovens, says President Yong Sik Lee. An automated oven, which costs about $165,000, can produce about 5,000 cookies an hour. While each cookie is still hot, a message is laid on top and the cookie folded before it cools. Mr. Lee, too, is guarded about the source of his list.

Further study someday may reveal that all fortunes can be traced to an original set that was used more than 60 years ago when the fortune cookie was invented.

At the beginning of this century, San Francisco's Chinatown was a ghetto, rife with the problems that plague any poor neighborhood. But by the 1930s, the neighborhood's exotic image was being used to attract tourists. During that marketing effort, a restaurant created the fortune cookie for visitors who expected a dessert course that Chinese cuisine largely lacks.

More recently, the messages have been revised, references to Confucius removed and gender-specific sentences edited.

Fortune cookie bakers say they are adding more actual fortunes to their messages. Says Mr. Lee, "I think people prefer the predictions, but it is very hard to satisfy their appetite."